Surrealist games for lockdown and a Magritte masterpiece – the week in art | Art and design

This week, art games of the week

Surrealist gamesThe surrealist movement started out by playing games in Parisian cafes. They wanted to tap the creative potential of the unconscious mind, and games like Exquisite Corpse – the avant-garde answer to consequences – helped. Exquisite Corpse quickly turns into a swearing and obscenity contest, at least in my family, and is totally hilarious.

More ways to play

The Lewis Chessmen Chess SetSupport the locked-down British Museum and learn about medieval art by purchasing one of its chess sets featuring the famous feudal figures found in the Hebrides. Various sizes and prices from a children’s set up.

Masterpiece and its progenyArt auctions have been a popular game idea since the old classic Masterpiece was played with the After Eights at sophisticated 1980s gatherings. You can only get Masterpiece second hand but there are several contemporary versions.

Masterpiece of the week

René Magritte, The Magic Mirror, National Galleries of ScotlandIs this a mirror? It has a vaguely oval mirror-like frame with a rudimentary handle, painted a fleshy pink, supporting a grey “glass” surface. Yet this mirror shows your reflection in words instead of an image. Seeing your pink face, it registers your reality with the accurate idiocy of bad AI: “corps humain”, it decides, “human body”. Mirrors have been symbols of realistic representation in art ever since Magritte’s fellow Belgian Jan van Eyck painted one in The Arnolfini Portrait, but here the bowler-hatted surrealist playfully proposes one that stands reality on its head. Things dissolve into language in Magritte’s uncanny philosophical art game.

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